The Great Geek Manual

512
A solar eclipse is recorded by a monastic historian in Ireland.

1613
The original Globe Theatre in London, England burns down accidentally when a cannon discharged during a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII sets fire to the building’s thatched roof.

1888
Edison’s foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, makes a wax cylinder recording in the Crystal Palace, London of a four thousand person choir performing Handel’s Israel in Egypt at a distance of more than one hundred yards from the phonograph. It is the first known recording of classical music.

1929
Construction of the first high-speed jet wind tunnel is completed at Langley Field, California, the field laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Preliminary design work began November 14, 1928. The tunnel is capable of producing wind speeds of about 600mph, permitting the testing of aerofoils. Read more about the history of wind tunnels at the US Centennial of Flight Commission and NASA websites.

1936
NBC station W2XBS broadcasts the first “high-definition” television signal from the Empire State Building using a 343-line system.

1948
Bell System installs the thirty millionth telephone in the US.

1952
The BBC begins to research the size of television audiences for the first time in history.

1954
By a vote of four to one, the US Atomic Energy Commission decides not to reinstate access to classified information to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 required consideration of “the character, associations, and loyalty” of the individuals engaged in the work of the Commission. Substantial defects of character along with imprudent and dangerous associations, particularly with known subversives who place the interests of foreign powers above those of the United States, are considered reasons for disqualification. The Commission thought that his associations with known Communists lasted too long to be justified as merely the intermittent and accidental revival of earlier friendships.

1961
The first US rocket to release three satellites is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Thor-Able-Star rocket Omicron 1 carries three payloads. The previous year, a similar rocket launched a payload of two satellites on June 22, 1960. A launch of eight satellites from one rocket will occur on March 9, 1965.

1979
United Artists releases Moonraker, directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Roger Moore as James Bond, Michael Lonsdale, Lois Chiles, Richard Kiel, and Corinne Clery, to 788 US theaters. It is the eleventh film in the James Bond franchise and the fourth to star Roger Moore. This installment takes Bond into space, where, in the climax of the film, a platoon of marines battle a cult whose mission is to wipe out all human life on Earth in a Star Wars-style laser fight. Produced on a budget of US$34 million, the film will gross US$7,108,344 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 2 hrs 6 mins

1984
Warner Communications begins talking with Jack Tramiel about the possible sale of part of Atari.

1989
CompuServe, the first major commercial online service in the United States, buys The Source, one of the earliest online services available in the United States for an undisclosed sum. CompuServe will shut it down for good on August 1st.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Emissary” first airs. (No. 246) In it, Worf’s ex-girlfriend comes to the Enterprise to help the crew intercept a 75-year-old Klingon exploration ship which believes the Federation and the Klingons are still enemies. Memory Alpha entry

1992
Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) and MIPS Computer Systems merged in a stock swap valued at US$333 million. SGI is a leader in computer graphics software and hardware and MIPS, founded by Stanford University Engineering School Dean John Hennessy, developed high-speed computer chips.

1995
The Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the the space station Russian space station Mir for the first time. (STS-71) The mission will last until July 4, 1995 and includes the exchange of Russian crew members. The docking tests a special module similar to one that was to be used to link shuttles with the international station when it was completed. For these five days, the space vehicles will form the largest man-made satellite ever to orbit the Earth. During this mission, astronauts will answer questions from school students over amateur radio, and perform life science experiments aboard the SpaceLab. The SpaceLab experiments are designed to understand how the Russian Space program combats the effects of long durations in space on the human body.

1998
The Gigabit Ethernet Alliance announces that the IEEE has ratified 802.3z as the Gigabit Ethernet standard.

Intel introduces the Pentium II Xeon processor for use in mid-range and higher servers and workstations, which operates at 400MHz, and includes 7.5 million transistors, a 100MHz bus, and a 64bit system bus.

1999
The Brazilian website of Centro de Informatica e Automaçáo do Estado de Santa Catarina S.A. is hacked by “bl0w team”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Companion.

2000
America Online completes the acquisition of Mapquest.Com.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) unveils the fastest computer in the world, the ASCI White. The computer was developed for the Department of Energy’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) and is capable of processing more calculations within one second than one person could do in ten million years on a common calculator. The peak performance of the computer is 12.3 teraflops, or 12.3 trillion operations per second. This extremely high performance is achieved through parallel processing. The system’s 8,192 IBM RS6000 SP Power3 processors each run at 375 MHz. The system also includes a total of 6Tb of RAM and more than 160 Tb of IBM TotalStorage 7133 Serial Disk System capacity. The system is housed in over two hundred cabinets and fills a large room the size of two basket ball courts and weighs 106 tons. The computer runs IBM’s AIX operating systems. User applications can be developed using the wide variety of languages including FORTRAN and C/C++. Read more at the IBM website.

Twenty-nine year old Ikenna Iffih, a student at Northwestern University’s College of Computer Science, pleads guilty to hacking into U.S. government computers. He will be sentenced on November 17, 2000 to six months of home detention, forty-eight months of supervised release, and US$5,000 in restitution. Iffih had hacked system at the US Defense Logistics Agency, Department of the Interior, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Northeastern University and Zebra Marketing Online Services (ZMOS).

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! India.

Yahoo! launches the Yahoo! Player.

2001
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) reveals that they have asked their work force for volunteers to take pay cuts and/or time off in the form of a ten percent pay cut or eight paid vacation days.

2004
In the case of Ashcroft v. ACLU, the United States Supreme Court upholds a lower court’s injunction against the enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) due to its probable violation of the First Amendment, however, the court’s ruling also sends the case back to the lower court for a trial that will give the government an opportunity to prove the law’s merits. The COPA is a law passed in 1998 in an attempt to restrict minors’ access to material defined as harmful to minors on the internet. In 2007, the law will be struck down, and in 2008, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will uphold the decision. Read the decision at Cornell.

Novell releases iFolder, an open source cross-platform program for sharing files across computer networks, for Windows NT and 2000 and Novell NetWare 5.1. Visit the software’s official website.

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) reduces the price of the PlayStation 2 to US$281.70. Nobumasa Morimoto-san of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Securities states that “…35,000 yen is not the price kids can afford…”

2005
Operation Site Down is conducted by the FBI in cooperation with law enforcement agents from ten other countries. The operation executes seventy raids in the United States and twenty in the ten other countries. These raids target leading warez groups which distribute and trade copyrighted games, movies, music, and software over the Internet. During the course of the raids, the FBI will seize 118 desktops, 13 laptops, and 4,567 disks. The operation will close down ten major filesharing networks, including eight major warez servers, and result in at least thirty-two charges and twenty conviction in the first year alone, though the operation will be considered on-going by the US Department of Justice even after that. Read the official Department of Justice press release.

Paramount Pictures releases the science fiction film War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Justin Chatwin, and Tim Robbins, to 3,908 US theater. The book is the fourth remake of the original 1953 film adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel of the same name. Produced on a budget of US$132 million, the film will gross US$64,878,725 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins

2006
Hollywood Pictures releases the horror film Stay Alive, directed by William Brent Bell and starring Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Muniz, Sophia Bush, Jimmi Simpson, Adam Goldberg, and Milo Ventimiglia, to 2,009 US theaters. After the brutal death of a friend, a group of friends begin dying one by one after playing a video game called “Stay Alive,” a blood-curdling game centered around a seventeenth century noblewoman known as the Blood Countess. When the friends realize that when they die in the game, they die for real, they set out to defeat the Blood Countess before its too late. Produced on a budget of US$9 million, the film will gross US$10,726,406 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 25 mins

The LA Times publishes a scathing editorial condemning the United States’ space shuttle program. “The shuttle is an unsafe, expensive way for humans to explore space just a few hundred miles above Earth. The problem with the shuttle isn’t chunks of foam, it’s the shuttle itself. NASA should mothball the program and put the nation’s scientific and technological expertise to better use.”

Nintendo releases the Nintendo DS portable gaming system in China.

Version 2.0.3 of OpenOffice.org, a free cross-platform suite of office applications, is released. Visit the official Open Office website.

2007
Apple releases the iPhone to throngs of waiting customers who camped in line outside Apple and AT&T stores around the country. The device, which was first announced on January 9, 2007 by Steve Jobs, will come to be considered one of the most anticipated product releases in history despite its high price tag. The iPhone stood out from other phones, much the same way the Apple II stood out from other computers in 1977, because it was the computer designed with users in mind. Price: US$600